The news that the king had woken up broke very late on Sunday night.  Yeonhee knew from the sparse messages she received from Yixing that the chief royal doctor had declared him stable, even if there were a number of health problems that had to be looked into and that may not even emerge in full for several weeks or even months, and that the king was currently unable to eat or speak or even move properly, and that he also wasn’t able to stay awake for long periods of time or handle the overstimulation of lots of people around him.  For the first time, the prince was also remarkably difficult to get hold of.  Text messages went unanswered for hours at a time, and he didn’t respond to phone calls.  Yeonhee didn’t blame him: he hadn’t been able to spend proper time with his father for seven months, and the limbo he’d been trapped in of losing his father but his father still physically being there had taken a massive toll on him that she was unable to fully fathom since she hadn’t exactly known him before the king’s accident.  It was clear, though, when he spoke to her at about one in the morning on the Monday, that he was blissfully happy and also extremely busy.

Campus was buzzing with the news when Yeonhee tiredly dragged herself out of bed at half seven to get started on a day of revision.  Jongdae accompanied her, as usual, and Yeonhee was even more grateful of his presence than before.  As a prominent republican, she’d often been called on to comment on happenings with the royal family, but it appeared that now she was dating the prince, the media absolutely had to have something from and nobody else would suffice.  Jongdae actually had to call campus security because there were too many to deal with by himself, though he and the other bodyguards did do a good job of steering her away from those they could escape from and at shielding her from journalists and student journalists and other curious people who managed to ambush her, (rightly) suspecting that she knew much more about the king’s condition than had been released to the general public.

Sehun was also pretty stressed, because for the first time he was having to step properly into the role Luhan had flung at him of Yeonhee’s aide, and Luhan had apparently told him around lunchtime that it was probably a good idea for Yeonhee to be seen saying something about her boyfriend’s father waking up from a coma.

“He’s kind of right that it won’t look good if you say nothing and the media then spin it as Yeonhee doesn’t care,” he said anxiously when he tracked Yeonhee down to one of the private study rooms in the library, interrupting a quiet discussion she and Baekhyun were having about financial reforms over the past century.

“I don’t want to encourage them to bother me when I’m revising,” Yeonhee groaned.

“I don’t want the country to think you’re a heartless witch,” he retorted, tugging on her arm to try to pull her to her feet.  “Baekhyun, help me here.”

Looking conflicted, Baekhyun sighed and got to his feet, standing behind Yeonhee to grip her under the armpits and haul her up.

“Noooo!” Yeonhee complained, reaching for her books.  Sehun muttered a swearword under his breath.  “Sehun, I still have this place booked for another fifteen minutes!  Can’t it wait?”

“Not really.”  Sehun plonked himself down in the nearest chair and picked up one of the books, opening it to a bookmarked page.  “But if it calms you down, detail the main points of the 1952 Great Tax Reform Act and why it was such an atrocious failure.”

It was a delicate balancing act to keep the various media outlets happy by Yeonhee agreeing to answer a few questions, but an equal number of questions for all of them (she limited it to three); to keep Yeonhee sane while she did it, because almost every media team in the country appeared to have sent somebody after her; and to ensure she didn’t end up giving a press conference, even only for five minutes, because that was not her place and would have made her look ambitious well above her station.  She and Sehun also both knew that if the media decided to spin her in a bad light, she was stuck between a rock and a hard place: not saying anything, as he had already said, would look terrible, but at the same time, appearing all over the media could look like she was being an opportunistic attention seeker, which was one of the reasons why she and Sehun had both decided it had to be short, and heartfelt.  She declined to comment on anything political and any ramifications of the king waking up, instead admitting that she’d never actually met the king and that she wished him a speedy recovery and was relieved and happy to see that he was awake.

She got a lot of journalists asking her what it meant for her personally that the king looked set to recovery.  It was obvious that they were referring to her history as a republican, and her less-than-flattering portrayals of the king as Pencilmania.

“Well, another round of Meet-the-Parents that’s going to be even more terrifying than the last one,” Yeonhee joked, but inside, she was wondering that as well.  Of course, there was every chance the king wouldn’t have a clue who she was, and also that he and Yixing shared a lot of personality in common and that he wouldn’t care provided he got on with her on a personal level, but it was still something she was going to have to face up to and she was very anxious about disappointing both the king and Yixing for not exactly being the type of person most people would want in a prince’s girlfriend.

Hopeful that this meant the journalists would at long last give her a break, even if it was only for a day, Yeonhee headed back to her room after she’d finished talking to them and eating dinner.  Sehun had gone off to find Che